Cloudchaser Sakonige the Red Wolf:Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the things that people don't like about Obamacare is that they'll be required to buy health insurance that they feel they don't need as they are in generally good health?

That is the whole issue. Say you're 25 and you say, "I'm young and healthy, I don't need insurance." So you don't buy any. Then, you get cancer and you try to get insurance, nobody will insure you because you have cancer.

the court should have sent it back to congress and told them to rewrite the bill and vote on it with the public's knowledge that this is a tax. I don't understand why Roberts rewrote it for them. it wasn't sold as a tax.

I'm still always shocked by how ridiculously stupid and uninformed most Americans are about their own health care.

A question: Would you tell the hospital to turn away someone dying because they couldn't pay?

If you answered yes, you're a sociopath. Seek help.

If you answered no, you believe in socialized medicine. Now we're just talking degrees of it. The American government spends more on health care than any other country in the world (per capita). Then of course you all have to pay for health insurance too. So fully socialized medicine would allow lowering taxes.

My Freeper friends and acquaintances are going absolutely apeshiat. A good friend of mine - sweet girl, but ultra-conservative - is calling this the death of Democracy as we know it, and that we're headed Europe's way.

Corvus:How is paying a tax if you don't "forcing you". Is the income tax "forcing you" not to make an income?

You don't pay income tax to a private corporation. Yet. Although the line between corporations and the state is now so blurry as to be functionally meaningless. I am not surprised that you are happy about this.

But if you ask them if they like the idea of preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and they're in favor.

if you ask them if they supported requiring companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance for their employees, and they're all for it.

If you ask them if they favored allowing children to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26, they're mostly cool with that.

If you ask them if they're in favor of mandatory health insurance for all Americans, and they're AGAINST it. However, if you ask them how the uninsured people should be handled, their answer is pretty much "Let them crash"

They didn't uphold the entire thing. They upheld the individual mandate not as part of the commerce clause, but part of the taxing power. The commerce clause can't regulate what you don't do. However, they found unconstitutional the expansion of medicaid.

I don't get how the Medicaid thing works; how is it that increasing the funding for a program for the states while also increasing the requirements for the states to qualify for the program is illegal unless you still give the states the previous level of funding if they comply with the previous requirements? The government changes the amount the states must match all the time for states, and it's always been they either accept the new rules or forgo federal funding for Medicaid (correct me if I'm wrong). Now that they are saying "we're increasing funding so you will have to pay more to match it" the Court has decided states can determine what amount they are willing to pay and the federal government must adjust funding to match what the state offers instead of saying that they aren't meeting the requirements? Were they just talking about the language in the bill itself or is this an overarching principle that might be applied elsewhere?

So what about working poor whose employers don't offer insurance, they pay the tax that they can ill afford and what do they get in return? Do they get health care in return? Can someone fill me in on how this doesn't fark over the uninsured? I don't think we had a problem with people refusing or choosing not to have insurance, just unable to afford not offered or refused by insurance co.

Thunderpipes:RolandGunner: Well, in the long run it's the best possible outcome if the law was going to be upheld. By changing the mandate penalty to a tax and, ruling out the commerce clause justification, the bill is upheld without issuing a blanket authorization for the federal government to force the purchase of goods and services.

But it just did. If Obama wants you to do something, you do it, or the feds tax you. That is force. Just wait until Pubs in the states start pushing something you don't like and enforce it with a tax..... Will you like it then?

They already use my taxes to fight wars I don't agree with, and to give bailouts to failing companies. How about taxes actually being used for something useful once?

We can only hope. I consider myself more to the right of center, but single payer is the only real way to do this.

Now there is absolutely ZERO reason for a health insurance company to lower premiums. They know people will buy insurance (if it's cheaper than the tax), so they can keep their prices just high enough so the cost/benefit is to buy the insurance instead of paying the tax. That's the magic premium cost right there. And, that'll be for a super-high deductible plan as well. Everything else will cost more. All the other companies will do the same (effectively an oligopoly). This won't make insurance any cheaper.

So many of my republican friends on FB are awfully silent. I wonder if they deleted the drafts of their "victory" posts, or are just staring at their words through disbelieving red, white and blue eyes.

WombatControl:Legally, this was a piss-poor decision. Yes, the Commerce Clause end of things was upheld, but the SCOTUS basically saved Congress by doing something that Congress never intended to do. That's judicial activism. If Congress had intended the mandate to be a tax, they could have done so directly. SCOTUS inferred that's what they did, which is not the proper role of a judge.

Politically, anyone who wants to argue this is good for Obama is kidding themselves. This is the worst outcome for Obama. (The best being the bill being upheld under the Commerce Clause, the second best being the bill being totally struck down.) Why is this the worst outcome?

1.) This just energized the living fark out of the GOP base. It was ObamaCare that motivated the Tea Party in 2010. Now it's going to do the same in 2012.

2.) It just took away their "RomneyCare" attacks. (Yes, the whole "RomneyCare" bit was incoherent to begin with, but it's less coherent now.)

3.) Obama is now responsible for a major middle-class tax increase. After saying that he wouldn't raise taxes. Repeatedly. This will be in every Romney attack ad through this election season. It should be in them now.

From now on, it's not "ObamaCare." It's the "Obama Health Care Tax". Let's have the President own his massive tax hike right through to November.

Doesn't matter. Americans got health care. This is a win for the American people, not just Obama. Obama will now go down as the first president who got Americans health care. His legacy in that regard, not to mention countless other things he's done as president, will solidify him as one of the greats.

colon_pow:the court should have sent it back to congress and told them to rewrite the bill and vote on it with the public's knowledge that this is a tax. I don't understand why Roberts rewrote it for them. it wasn't sold as a tax.

can you say bait and switch?

colon_pow is disappoint.

can we go back and redo the votes for the wars too? knowing what we know now.

soporific:This will not cost Obama votes, and in fact this could help shore up support, because the people who really benefit will now have a motivation to get out there and vote. If the Dems are smart, and who knows they might surprise us, then they'll make sure those pesky non-voting young people realize that letting Republicans take control will directly impact them. If Republicans make this a central issue, they might motivate a lot of voting against them.

This. Anyone dense enough to use a Supreme Court decision upholding an act of Congress as a major motivation for voting against Obama was never going to vote for Obama in the first place.

If anything, it will increase conservative apathy cause the teabaggers don't think their Lord-and-Savior Mitt Romney (lol) can be trusted to do anything.

And if he doesn't purchase insurance? And those that can't afford it? Who will pay for them?

The funny thing is that I was repeatedly berated here for calling Obamacare a tax. It will be interesting to see how this fleshes out. On the upside for Obama, he got his bill. On the downside, it could be a "read my lips" situation for him.

It's much like the taxes I pay for being childless, single and not owning my own home.

MasterThief:From SCOTUSBlog: "The rejection of the Commerce Clause and Nec. and Proper Clause [arguments in favor of the ACA] should be understood as a major blow to Congress's authority to pass social welfare laws. Using the tax code -- especially in the current political environment -- to promote social welfare is going to be a very chancy proposition."

the commerce clause has been stretched to include basically anything that congress says it does and the courts have upheld it. It seems unlikely that there's any real danger of Congresses authority being limited too much on that front.

/haven't managed to make it through all 193 pages of the opinion quite yet